[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Artist/teacher and system from MIT

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Two articles, one about an artist and teacher and the other an article 
about a system that allows nearly blind individuals to see from MIT.
Good reading,
Lisa


http://www.mountvernonnews.com/local/06/06/03/albert.html

http://news.com.com/Bringing+vision+to+the+nearly+blind/2100-11395_3-6079551.html

link to the Projects of the Visual Experiences for the Blind Group at MIT
http://mit.edu/veb/intro.html


Celebrating an artist and volunteer
Friday, June 02, 2006
DANVILLE — On May 16, the Danville Elementary community, family and 
friends gathered to celebrate the life of Cherry Albert, a faithful 
volunteer at the school. Albert, who passed away May 5, was a legally 
blind artist who shared her talents with the Danville pupils, and 
encouraged them to express themselves through painting and drawing. She 
was instrumental in engaging the pupils in an international art 
exchange, and also created the wall paintings which grace the hall in 
the elementary building.

In keeping with Albert’s wishes, the memorial assembly honoring her 
focussed on helping students understand what it’s like for individuals 
with a visual deficit. Patty Yarman, assisted by her guide dog, 
Roosevelt, told the students about guide dog etiquette. She discussed 
“intelligent disobedience” and demonstrated how Roosevelt helps her 
negotiate around obstacles.

Next, Winifred Sturtevant of the Eyedeal Friends of Knox County 
presented a plaque to the school in Albert’s honor.

“Cherry brought joy and happiness to everyone she knew, and always 
looked for the best in people,” she said.

First-graders then took over the program. Amber McKee gave a 
demonstration on walking with a white cane, and showed how a white cane 
helps visullay impaired people get around safely. Jordan Stimpert and 
Andrew Bullock demonstrated the proper way for a sighted individual to 
guide a blind person, and showed the proper elbow or arm grip to use. 
The first-graders then performed “The Cherry Play,” extolling the value 
of the senses of touch, listening and taste.

All the students, as the assembly concluded, joined local musician Erin 
Salva in singing a special song written in Albert’s honor, a song which 
celebrated all the things you can “see” without eyes.




article


Bringing vision to the nearly blind

By Candace Lombardi

Story last modified Mon Jun 05 06:28:11 PDT 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The head of an MIT research group has codeveloped a 
system that allows nearly blind individuals to see.
Elizabeth Goldring is director of the Visual Experiences for the Blind 
Group at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) and a nearly 
blind poet and artist. Due to a condition called proliferative 
retinopathy, Goldring sees only light and shadows.

"It comes and goes and mostly goes. I have no useful vision in my right 
eye. I use the machine on my left eye, which hovers around legally 
blind," Goldring told CNET News.com.

But using technology she helped create, she can see a Picasso line 
drawing, and read hundreds of words.

Goldring codeveloped a device called the Retinal Imaging Machine Vision 
System (RIMVS) over the last 15 years in collaboration with several 
scientists, doctors and MIT students. The machine allows those with 
vision as poor as 20/400--people who see only light and shadows in their 
everyday life--to read words, view color artwork and take virtual 
walk-throughs of architectural spaces.

The RIMVS works by projecting images directly onto a person's retina, 
using a light-emitting diode (LED) that passes through an LCD screen. 
Collimated light (light whose waves are parallel) focuses directly on 
the center of the pupil when a person puts an eye up to the projector. 
The entire system consists of the projector, a desktop computer, a 
monitor and a joystick.



Credit: MIT
Elizabeth Goldring"The beauty of the seeing machine is that you can load 
and place anything you can place on a regular computer desktop onto the 
machine. It's very simple. Someone without (vision loss) just needs to 
load it for the person with low vision," said Jackie McConnell, an 
undergraduate research student who works with Goldring.

The machine resembles a film projector, and to someone with 20/20 vision 
its images are recognizable but littered with graphical elements 
resembling the Benday dots of a Roy Lichtenstein "comics panel" 
painting. According to Goldring, a low-vision person sees the image 
without seeing this visual clutter.

While it is technically true that anything viewable on the average 
computer desktop also can be viewed via the RIMVS, Goldring says that 
most nearly blind people can see only simpler images. The bold 
rectangles of a Mondrian painting, for example, would be relatively easy 
for a low-vision person to see through the RIMVS. According to 
McConnell, it is still hard for low-vision individuals to see an entire 
Web page.

"Bad seeing is slow seeing, and you get too much visual info pretty fast 
and you can't cope if you can't see well," Goldring said, referring to 
her difficulty seeing complex images like Web pages via the RIMVS.


Goldring first was exposed to the idea of a "seeing machine" in 1985, 
when she was tested with a Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (SLO) machine 
by Dr. Robert H. Webb. Webb, the inventor of the SLO, is a senior 
scientist at the Schepens Eye Research Institute at Harvard University, 
and continues to collaborate with Goldring. He was using the SLO at the 
time to conduct diagnostic tests on Goldring's retina, after 
hemorrhaging had left her essentially blind. Goldring was able to read 
the word turtle. She then asked Webb to write the word sun and was able 
to see that, too, much to her joy.

"I do have visual experience. I have the persistence of visual memory. 
You lose visual memory, or it begins to erode. I was without it long 
enough that I realized (at one point), 'my visual memory has been 
eroded.' The (SLO) machine did stimulate my visual thinking," Goldring said.

Since her first exposure to the SLO, Goldring has continued using 
retinal projection as a gateway to visual experience. In doing so, she 
has developed an English-language dictionary of visual words for the 
legally blind.

The dictionary, "Visual Language for the Blind," consists of three- or 
four-letter words that incorporate a symbol into the characters to 
better trigger recognition. She concentrates on nouns, verbs and words 
linked to spatial concepts.

The word book, for example, features the image of an open book in lieu 
of the double "o." In addition to hundreds of these visual words, 
Goldring has also created animated graphics-interchange-format poems in 
which words and images move to further illustrate their definitions.

Beyond diagnostics
With the help of a grant from NASA, RIMVS was used in a pilot study of 
10 people to determine if the machine could be a useful seeing aid for 
reading, viewing artwork and previewing architectural spaces, rather 
than a strictly diagnostic tool. The results of the study were released 
in the February 2006 issue of Optometry.


The participants ranged in age from 38 to 80 and had a visual acuity of 
20/70 to 20/400 in their better-seeing eye. The subjects used the 
machine to view words from Goldring's visual dictionary and artwork 
presented within a virtual architectural space.

Every subject who participated was able to identify at least eight of 
the 10 images presented to them, with six subjects recognizing all 10.

RIMVS has also been used to create virtual architectural spaces for 
users to "walk" through. This reporter was introduced to a virtual 
museum on whose walls "hung" Goldring's own art and words from her 
visual dictionary.

The art, which Goldring refers to as "retina prints," consists of a 
featured image taken with Goldring's own digital camera layered over the 
image of a retina, a symbol of the RIMVS process.

With the RIMVS joystick, the user can move through the rooms as one 
would in a video game. Viewers can get as "close" to a painting as they 
need to in order to see it clearly--something Goldring said is always 
problematic for people with poor vision who tour actual museums.

"You can see it (artwork) in the space and then get the experience 
without necessarily having to be there when you see the painting. I've 
never been able to enjoy museums. I have horrible problems in museums 
because you're not supposed to get too close. You're not supposed to 
touch. And I am obviously not a big label reader," Goldring joked.


The technology is costly. The machine that currently sits in MIT's 
Center for Advanced Visual Studies was donated by Canon, but would 
otherwise cost $100,000, not including service repairs. (Goldring's work 
is also partially funded by Apple Computer.) This currently prohibits 
regular personal use of the device among people with low vision.

What, then, are Golding's plans for the technology?

"To build a robust color-seeing machine, make a prototype and get it in 
to the hands of people who can use it," she said.

And, she added, she hopes the research will help expose the issue to 
future technology developers and designers.

"I am hoping to make more students at MIT aware of people who don't have 
good eyesight. Because those are the people with eyes and they will 
ultimately be the developers and designers of technology," she said. 
"All those new iPods and cell phones, all that designers do and they 
don't realize that people with low vision cannot use them. But I know 
the students who work with me end up having a sensitivity to people with 
low vision that I don't think they'll forget."